I'm a financial journalist and author with experience as a lawyer, speaker and entrepreneur. As a senior editor at Forbes, I have covered the broad range of topics that affect boomers as they approach retirement age. That means everything from financial strategies and investment scams to working and living better as we get older. My most recent book is Estate Planning Smarts -- a guide for baby boomers and their parents. If you have story ideas or tips, please e-mail me at: deborah [at] estateplanningsmarts [dot] com. You can also follow me on Twitter

Conversation With Baby Boomers

After 23 years of contributing articles to many different publications, I have decided to make my journalistic home at Forbes. This puts me in the company of an extraordinary team of financial journalists pioneering new ways to harness digital and print media.

My goal on this page is to have a conversation with baby boomers. I am a member of this generation – born between 1946 and 1964 – although I prefer to describe my age in anecdotal terms, rather than getting too specific about the numbers. Suffice it to say that I had given up afternoon naps by the time Kennedy was assassinated.

We are a generation that had the luxury of choices and opportunities during our formative years. Thanks to the women’s movement, I was able to attend law school, have a woman as my boss during the years that I practiced law and delay childbirth until my career was well grounded.

If making choices was the theme of our youth, adapting to radical changes is the challenge for us today. Going forward, new technology, economic upheaval and shifts in the work world will alter the way we live, support our families and recreate.

Enormous uncertainties lie ahead. Can we preserve the assets we’ve accumulated – whether or not we consider ourselves wealthy? Will the children we have worked so hard to raise achieve financial self-sufficiency? Will we have enough money to support our current lifestyle, assuming we live to an advanced age? Have we set aside sufficient funds for the education of children and grandchildren?

The good news is that better healthcare will enable many of us to live longer. Some of us will spend these years fruitfully in work, recreation or some combination of the two. The bad news is that more of us than any other generation will develop dementia in our later years. As a society we are ill equipped for this development.

I hope this page will become a go-to source of education, information and inspiration about the wide range of financial issues that concern baby boomers. Wealth management will be a continuing theme, whether it’s preserving what we have earned from excess taxes, our own mishandling or depletion by creditors and predators. So will finding meaningful work, whether by volunteering or carving our new careers.

I came of age as a financial journalist writing for this audience – with stints as a columnist covering small business, workplace issues and all aspects of wealth transfer and preservation. In my latest entrepreneurial venture, I self-published my book Estate Planning Smartswww.estateplanningsmarts.com and defied the big publishers’ predictions that a book on this stressful subject could never become a bestseller.

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Deborah, I think your column will be a help to many Boomers because of the volatility we’re seeing in the economy and the fear it strikes us. I’m following your posts and will see if I can you link you to my blog, Work, Careers & Jobs@40+ on blogspot. Looking forward to reading your columns!

Thanks to all for your kind words. The format of our new articles pages makes it easy to follow future columns: click “+ Follow” in red at the top of the article; then indicate how often you want updates (for example, daily or weekly). I welcome your comments on future posts!